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The Linguistic Colonialism of English - Brown Political Review - 0 views

brownpoliticalreview.org/...linguistic-colonialism-english
shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, the West has spread its preferred systems of capitalism, democracy, and moral values.
  • As a result of this, contemporary English is detached from any specific cultural identity; it is a tool which links different societies in an increasingly smaller world.
  • The first population to speak English was the British. About five hundred years ago, between five and seven million people spoke the language; today, about 1.8 billion people do.
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  • Processes of violent imperialism have paved the way for the cultural pandemic originating in the West
  • Most former British colonies now use English as their official language (e.g. Ghana and South Africa). Ever since the US colonized Puerto Rico after winning the Spanish-American war (note the absence of Puerto Rico, or Cuba, in the name of the war), the official languages on the island became Spanish and, of course, English.
  • Today, English is the third most spoken language in the world and tops the list of second languages. English is a necessity for studying at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, a ticket to working almost anywhere in the world, and an instrument enabling a livelihood in the wealthiest nations.
  • This phenomenon feeds into the growth of social inequality linked to globalization. The majority of the time, English learned as a second language in public schools does not create a proficiency level adequate for working, studying, or relying on the language in daily life.
  • People dedicate their time and resources to learning and perfecting their understanding and knowledge of English, rather than preserving their own customs and culture.
  • The process of globalization leads people to visualize an array of opportunities and an exponentially better future linked to the English language. A language is not only an instrument of communication, however. It is also the tool of a society, made up of its culture, traditions, and sets of religious and ideological beliefs
  • English has also become the main language used in science. Doctors around the world use English to communicate their findings. Most research papers are written in English as a way to facilitate international scientific cooperation.
  • Although this may seem like a necessity to promote scientific discovery, the resulting gap is problematic. The researchers who have not had the chance to learn English are at a disadvantage.
  • These processes suggest a disconcerting implication – globalization is simply a more “socially acceptable” means of imperialism, without violence
  • Globalization and the expansion of the English language have resulted in oppression and inequality.
  • If the preservation of other cultures is given the same importance and value as spreading English is currently receiving, the language can be an addition, not a replacement, to a naturally evolving culture’s array of nuances.
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What Gen Z Latino Voters Want America To Know : Code Switch : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...the-latinx-vote-comes-of-age Latino election politics
shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Latinx voters have seldom been taken seriously by electoral politics.
  • In August, two thirds of Latino voters polled by Latino Decisions said they had not been contacted by either Republicans or Democrats ahead of the 2020 election.
  • For the first time, they are projected to be the second-largest voting demographic, trailing only behind non-Hispanic white people.
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  • I'm faced with reading the news about another Black person being killed, just because of their skin color, or another trans woman being killed because of their identity. So, I'm taking this fear, and I'm taking these emotions and I'm stepping up."
  • How did the system become so messed up that the people haven't been represented?
  • And according to historian Geraldo Cadava, there are a million more eligible Latino voters this election cycle than there were in 2016.
  • "I think people are doing a terrible job of getting young people to vote, because they are trying to fit us in their system that is inherently against a radical teenager's thought.
  • people are like, 'Why aren't young people voting?' It's because politics is terrible in the U.S.!
  • Not being a very politically active person isn't really an excuse to turn a blind eye to what's happening now."
  • "Sometimes I just feel like they are aware that we are important, but at the end of the day we are not going to get the respect that we deserve.
  • After the elections, they are just going to portray us with stereotypes, and they are just going to forget about writing stories that actually reflect who we are.
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Memory - 0 views

sohowdoweknow.weebly.com/memory.html
shared by katedriscoll on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • MEMORY Your memory plays perhaps a more important role in the acquisition of knowledge than you may realise. Our memory shapes our personal and shared identity. A large amount of second hand knowledge has been passed on through language to become part of the shared knowledge of knowledge communitie
  • Even though memories can be biased and blurry, they do play an important role in the construction of knowledge. Consider how you would know anything without memory
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Mutated virus may reinfect people already stricken once with covid-19, sparking debate ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...riant-reinfection-south-africa virus Covid-19 research immunity mutation
shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • it appears a vaccine is better than natural infection in protecting people, calling it “a big, strong plug to get vaccinated” and a reality check for people who may have assumed that because they have already been infected, they are immune.
  • In the placebo group of the trial for Novavax’s vaccine, people with prior coronavirus infections appeared just as likely to get sick as people without them, meaning they weren’t fully protected against the B.1.351 variant that has swiftly become dominant in South Africa.
  • “The data really are quite suggestive: The level of immunity that you get from natural infection — either the degree of immunity, the intensity of the immunity or the breadth of immunity — is obviously not enough to protect against infection with the mutant,” Fauci said.
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  • She and others emphasized the apparent lack of severe health repercussions from reinfection — and the lack of evidence that reinfection is common.
  • Nearly 4 percent of people who had a previous infection were reinfected, an almost identical rate to those with no history of infection.
  • “Basically, it’s saying vaccination actually needs to be better than natural immunity. But vaccination is better than natural immunity.”
  • The study backs up recent laboratory data from South African researchers analyzing blood plasma from recovered patients. Nearly half of the plasma samples had no detectable ability to block the variant from infecting cells in a laboratory dish
  • The good news is that vaccine trials from Johnson & Johnson and Novavax show that vaccines can work — even against the B.1.351 variant, and particularly in preventing severe illness.
  • Novavax did not provide a breakdown of mild, moderate and severe cases, but severe cases of covid-19 were rare in the trial, suggesting that reinfection is unlikely to send people to the hospital.
  • “It is not surprising to see reinfection in individuals who are convalescent. And it would not be surprising to see infection in people who are vaccinated, especially a few months out from vaccine,”
  • “The key is not whether people get reinfected, it’s whether they get sick enough to be hospitalized.
  • “If the data holds true, it means we will need to walk the public back on the idea of how close we are to the finish line for ending this pandemic.”
  • Projections created by data scientist Youyang Gu — whose pandemic models have been cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — suggest that about 65 percent of America’s population will reach immunity by June 1. But built into that 65 percent is roughly 20 percent having immunity from past infections only.
  • In a separate study, scientists at Rockefeller University in New York took blood plasma from people who had been vaccinated and found that vaccine-generated antibodies were largely able to block mutations found on the B.1.351 variant.
  • I think the fact that we … now have data from two vaccines indicating that we can prevent serious disease, even against the new variant, is hopeful,”
  • A future concern needing close monitoring is whether the reformulation of vaccines to keep up with the evolving virus could drive the virus to continue evolving.
  • There is also a concern that subpar immunity could allow new resistant variants to emerge. That possibility, Nussenzweig said, is one reason that people should get both doses of a vaccine, on time.
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YOU ARE NOT A RACIST TO CRITICIZE CRITICAL RACE THEORY. - It Bears Mentioning - 0 views

johnmcwhorter.substack.com/...-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize race theory critical CRT bias education
shared by Javier E on 17 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The early writings by people like Regina Austin, Richard Delgado, Kimberlé Crenshaw are simply hard-leftist legal analysis, proposing a revised conception of justice that takes oppression into account, including a collective sense of subordinate group identity. These are hardly calls to turn schools into Maoist re-education camps fostering star chambers and struggle sessions.However, this, indeed, is what is happening to educational institutions across the country.
  • 1. Young children should not be taught if white to be guilty and if black to feel a) oppressed and b) wary of white kids around them (and if South Asian to be very, very confused …).
  • "What we are interested in here might be termed “critical pedagogy.” “Critical pedagogy” names — without exhaustively defining — the host of concepts, terms, practices, and theories that have lately taken hold in many public and private schools. This term alludes to a connection to CRT — it might be thought of as critical race theory as applied to schooling — but also to “critical studies” and “critical theory,” a broader set of contemporary philosophical ideas that have been particularly influential in certain circles of the modern Left."
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  • In a dialogue premised on good faith, we can assume that when politicos and parents decry “Critical Race Theory,” what they refer to is the idea of oppression and white perfidy treated as the main meal of an entire school’s curriculum.
  • what most of us (as opposed to the Establishment in schools of education) think, and are correct about, is this:
  • it is no tort to call it "CRT" in shorthand when:1) these developments are descended from its teachings and2) their architects openly bill themselves as following the tenets of CRT.
  • 2. Young children should not be taught that the American story is mainly (note I write mainly rather than only, but mainly is just as awful here) one of oppression and racism. Not because it’s unpleasant and because sinister characters want to “hide” it, but because it’s dumb.
  • 3. While there is room for the above ideas to be presented to children as some among many – maybe; I’m bending over backwards here – this kind of thought should certainly not be the fulcrum of a school’s entire curriculum, as has been reported at schools like Dalton and others in New York.
  • 1) Criticizing Critical Race Theory as it operates in 2021 does not require perusing the oeuvre of Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the critique is not invalidated by the differences between what articles like that contained and what’s happening in our schools now.
  • 2) Criticizing Critical Race Theory does not mean teaching students that America has been nothing but great.
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Andrew Sullivan: Is There a Way to Acknowledge Our Progress? - 0 views

nymag.com/...-acknowledge-our-progress.html perception threat progress human psychology bias perspective pessimism
shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • ft of recent books have been full of the need for renewed rage against the oppression of women. The demonization of “white men” has intensified just as many working-class white men face a bleak economic future and as men are disappearing from the workforce. It is as if the less gender discrimination there is, the angrier you should become.
  • You see it in the gay-rights movement too. I get fundraising emails all the time reminding me how we live in a uniquely perilous moment for LGBTQ Americans and that this era, in the words of Human Rights Campaign spokesperson Charlotte Clymer, is one “that has seen unprecedented attacks on LGBTQ people.
  • Might I suggest some actual precedents: when all gay sex was criminal, when many were left by their government to die of AIDS, when no gay relationships were recognized in the law, when gay service members were hounded out of their mission, when the federal government pursued a purge of anyone suspected of being gay. All but the last one occurred in my adult lifetime. But today we’re under “unprecedented” assault?
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  • a recent psychological study suggests a simpler explanation. Its core idea is what you might call “oppression creep” or, more neutrally, “prevalence-induced concept change.” The more progress we observe, the greater the remaining injustices appear.
  • We seem incapable of keeping a concept stable over time when the prevalence of that concept declines.
  • lthough modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism.
  • We see relatively, not absolutely. We change our standards all the time, depending on context.
  • When blue dots became rare, purple dots began to look blue; when threatening faces became rare, neutral faces began to appear threatening … This happened even when the change in the prevalence of instances was abrupt, even when participants were explicitly told that the prevalence of instances would change, and even when participants were instructed and paid to ignore these changes.
  • We seem to be wired to assume a given threat remains just as menacing even when its actual prevalence has declined:
  • “In other words, when the prevalence of blue dots decreased, participants’ concept of blue expanded to include dots that it had previously excluded.”
  • This study may help explain why, in the midst of tremendous gains for gays, women, and racial minorities, we still insist more than ever that we live in a patriarchal, misogynist, white supremacist, homophobic era.
  • whatever the cause, the result is that we steadfastly refuse to accept the fact of progress, in a cycle of eternal frustration at what injustices will always remain
  • We never seem to be able to say: “Okay, we’re done now, we’ve got this, politics has done all it reasonably could, now let’s move on with our lives.” We can only ever say: “It’s worse than ever!” And fe
  • picking someone who has bent the truth so often about so many things — her ancestry, her commitment to serving a full term as senator, the schools her kids went to, the job her father had (according to her brother), or the time she was “fired” for being pregnant — is an unnecessary burden.
  • The Democrat I think is most likely to lose to Trump is Elizabeth Warren.I admire her ambition and grit and aggression, but nominating a woke, preachy Harvard professor plays directly into Trump’s hands
  • Pete Buttigieg’s appeal has waned for me.
  • over time, the combination of his perfect résumé, his actorly ability to change register as he unpacks a sentence, and his smoothness and self-love have begun to worry me. My fear is that his appeal will fade
  • Klobuchar, to my mind, is the better midwestern option. She is an engaging and successful politician. But there’s a reason she seemingly can’t get more traction. She just doesn’t command a room
  • I so want Biden to be ten years younger. I can’t help but be very fond of the man, and he does have a mix of qualities that appeal to both African-Americans and white working-class midwesterners. What I worry about is his constant stumbling in his speech, his muddling of words, those many moments when his eyes close, and his face twitches, as he tries to finish a sentence
  • Sanders has been on the far left all his life, and the oppo research the GOP throws at him could be brutal. He’s a man, after all, who sided with a Marxist-Leninist party that supported Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis in 1979. He loved the monstrous dictator Fidel Castro and took his 1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union, no less, where he openly and publicly criticized his own country and praised many aspects of the Soviet system
  • On two key issues, immigration and identity politics, Bernie has sensibilities and instincts that could neutralize these two strong points for Trump. Sanders has always loathed the idea of open borders and the effect they have on domestic wages, and he doesn’t fit well with the entire woke industry. He still believes in class struggle, not the culture war
  • Biden has an advantage because of Obama, his appeal to the midwestern voters (if he wins back Pennsylvania, that would work wonders), and his rapport with African-Americans. But he also seems pretty out of it.
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Ancient DNA Shows Humans Settled Caribbean in 2 Distinct Waves - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dna-caribbean-islands.html caribbean dna research language origins human origins American Indian native americans
shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Before the advent of Caribbean genetic studies, archaeologists provided most of the clues about the origins of people in the region. The first human residents of the Caribbean appear to have lived mostly as hunter-gatherers, catching game on the islands and fishing at sea while also maintaining small gardens of crops.
  • Archaeologists have discovered a few burials of those ancient people. Starting in the early 2000s, geneticists managed to fish out a few tiny bits of preserved DNA in their bones. Significant advances in recent years have made it possible to pull entire genomes from ancient skeletons.
  • “We went from zero full genomes two years ago to over 200 now,”
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  • The genes of the oldest known residents of the Caribbean link them with the earliest populations that settled in Central and South America.
  • Part of the problem is that scientists have yet to find ancient DNA in the Caribbean that is more than 3,000 years old
  • The other problem is that ancient DNA is still scarce on the Caribbean coast of the mainland.
  • About 2,500 years ago, the archaeological record shows, there was a drastic shift in the cultural life of the Caribbean. People started living in bigger settlements, intensively farming crops like maize and sweet potatoes. Their pottery became more sophisticated and elaborate. For archaeologists, the change indicates the end of what they call the Archaic Age and the start of a Ceramic Age.
  • The skeletons from the Ceramic Age largely shared a new genetic signature. Their DNA links them to small tribes still living today in Colombia and Venezuela.
  • We don’t know a lot about these languages, although some words have managed to survive. Hurricane, for example, comes from hurakán, the Taino name for the god of storms.
  • The people bearing Ceramic Age ancestry came to dominate the Caribbean, with almost no interbreeding between the two groups.
  • These words bear a striking resemblance to words from a family of languages in South America called Arawak. The DNA of the Ceramic Age Caribbeans most closely resembles that of living Arawak speakers.
  • the new DNA findings had surprised him in many ways, giving him a host of new questions to investigate.
  • Over the course of the Ceramic Age, for example, strikingly new pottery styles emerged every few centuries. Researchers have long guessed that those shifts reflect the arrival of new groups of people in the islands. The ancient DNA doesn’t support that idea, though. There’s a genetic continuity through those drastic cultural changes. It appears that the same group of people in the Caribbean went through a series of major social changes that archaeologists have yet to explain.
  • Dr. Reich and his fellow geneticists also discovered family ties that spanned the Caribbean during the Ceramic Age. They found 19 pairs of people on different islands who shared identical segments of DNA — a sign that they were fairly close relatives. In one case, they found long-distance cousins from the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, separated by over 800 miles.
  • “The original idea was that people start in one place, they establish a colony someplace else, and then they just cut all ties to where they came from,” Dr. Keegan said. “But the genetic evidence is suggesting that these ties were maintained over a long period of time.”
  • Rather than being made up of isolated communities, in other words, the Caribbean was a busy, long-distance network that people regularly traveled by dugout canoe. “The water is like a highway,”
  • The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions
  • The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands.
  • now, with a population of about 44 million people, the Caribbean may contain more Taino DNA than it did in 1491.
  • Dr. Aviles and his colleagues have uploaded the ancient Caribbean genomes to a genealogical database called GEDMatch. With the help of genealogists, people can compare their own DNA to the ancient genomes. They can see the matching stretches of genetic material that reveal their relatedness.
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5 key facts about language and the brain - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...324529
shared by caelengrubb on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and ar
  • While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences
  • As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language, the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Though it remains unclear at what point the ancestors of modern humans first started to develop spoken language, we know that our Homo sapiens predecessors emerged around 150,000–200,000 years ago. So, Prof. Pagel explains, complex speech is likely at least as old as that
  • A study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that committed language students experienced growth in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with learning and spatial navigation, as well as in parts of the cerebral cortex, or the outmost layer of the brain.
  • In fact, researchers have drawn many connections between bilingualism or multilingualism and the maintenance of brain health
  • Multiple studies, for instance, have found that bilingualism can protect the brain against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
  • Being bilingual has other benefits, too, such as training the brain to process information efficiently while expending only the necessary resources on the tasks at hand.
  • Research now shows that her assessment was absolutely correct — the language that we use does change not only the way we think and express ourselves, but also how we perceive and interact with the world.
  • Language holds such power over our minds, decision-making processes, and lives, so Broditsky concludes by encouraging us to consider how we might use it to shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.
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Critical Theory - New Discourses - 1 views

newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-theory politics psychology knowledge critical theory
shared by huffem4 on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • According to these theorists, a “critical” theory may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human “emancipation from slavery,” acts as a “liberating … influence,” and works “to create a world which satisfies the needs and powers” of human beings (Horkheimer 1972, 246).
  • Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many “critical theories” in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies.
  • The Critical Theory of the “Institute for Social Research,” which is better known as the Frankfurt School, focused on power analyses that began from a Marxist (or Marxian) perspective with an aim to understand why Marxism wasn’t proving successful in Western contexts. It rapidly developed a “post-Marxist” position that criticized Marx’s primary focus on economics and expanded his views on power, alienation, and exploitation into all aspects of post-Enlightenment Western culture. These theorists sometimes referred to themselves as “cultural Marxists,” and were referred to that way by others, but the term “cultural Marxism” is now more commonly used to describe (a misconception of) postmodernism (see also, neo-Marxism) or a certain anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
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  • a Traditional Theory is meant to be descriptive of some phenomenon, usually social, and aims to understand how it works and why it works that way, a Critical Theory should proceed from a prescriptive normative moral vision for society, describe how the item being critiqued fails that vision (usually in a systemic sense), and prescribe activism to subvert, dismantle, disrupt, overthrow, or change it—that is, generally, to break and then remake society in accordance with the particular critical theory’s prescribed vision
  • One of the ambitions of the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School was to address cultural power in a way that allowed an awakening of working-class consciousness out of the ideology of capitalism in order to overcome it.
  • Critical theories in a broader sense are largely understood to be the critical study of various types of power relations within myriad aspects of culture, often under a broad rubric referred to in general as “cultural studies.”
  • They are to be found within many disciplines and subdisciplines within the theoretical humanities, including cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, ethnic/race/whiteness/black studies, sexuality/LGBT/trans studies, postcolonial, indigenous, and decolonial studies, disability studies, and fat studies. Critical theories of various kinds are also to be found within (but not necessarily dominant over) other fields of the humanities, social sciences, and arts, including English (literature), sociology, philosophy, art, history and, particularly, pedagogy (theory of education).
  • The focus on identity, experiences, and activism, rather than an attempt to find truth, leads to conflict with empirical scholars and undermines public confidence in the worth of scholarship that uses this approach.
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Why Do People Believe in Conspiracy Theories? | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...believe-in-conspiracy-theories psychology
shared by caelengrubb on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The researchers found that reasons for believing in conspiracy theories can be grouped into three categories: The desire for understanding and certainty The desire for control and security The desire to maintain a positive self-image
  • Seeking explanations for events is a natural human desire
  • We all harbor false beliefs, that is, things we believe to be true but in fact are not.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • After all, you were simply misinformed, and you’re not emotionally invested in it.
  • Conspiracy theories are also false beliefs, by definition. But people who believe in them have a vested interest in maintaining them
  • People need to feel they’re in control of their lives
  • conspiracy theories can give their believers a sense of control and security. This is especially true when the alternative account feels threatening.
  • Research shows that people who feel socially marginalized are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. We all have a desire to maintain a positive self-image, which usually comes from the roles we play in life—our jobs and our relationships with family and friends
  • Most people who believe global warming is real or that vaccines are safe don’t do so because they understand the science. Rather, they trust the experts
  • we have a good understanding of what motivates people to believe in conspiracy theories. That is, they do so because of three basic needs we all have: to understand the world around us, to feel secure and in control, and to maintain a positive self-image.
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Pandemic Advice From Athletes - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...athletes-pandemic-advice.html pandemic climate change psychology endurance resilience toughness mental health goals process pacing perseverance
shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • There’s a special kind of exhaustion that the world’s best endurance athletes embrace. Some call it masochistic, others may call it brave. When fatigue sends legs and lungs to their limits, they are able to push through to a gear beyond their pain threshold. These athletes approach fatigue not with fear but as a challenge, an opportunity.
  • It’s a quality that allows an ultramarathoner to endure what could be an unexpected rough segment of an 100-mile race, or a sailor to push ahead when she’s in the middle of the ocean, racing through hurricane winds alone.
  • The drive to persevere is something some are born with, but it’s also a muscle everyone can learn to flex. In a way, everyone has become an endurance athlete of sorts during this pandemic, running a race with no finish line that tests the limits of their exhaustion.
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  • One message they all had: You are stronger than you think you are, and everyone is able to adapt in ways they didn’t think possible.
  • there are a few techniques to help you along — 100-mile race not required.
  • There’s a pacing in living day to day, just as there’s pacing in climbing.
  • Training to become an elite endurance athlete means learning to embrace discomfort. Instead of hiding from pain, athletes must learn to work with it. A lot of that comes down to pacing
  • Similarly, as you muscle through an ongoing pandemic, you must look for ways to make peace with unknowns and new, uncomfortable realities. “When we think about the coronavirus, we are in it for the long run; so how do you pace yourself?”
  • She recommends thinking about your routines, practicing positive self-talk and focusing on processes instead of outcomes
  • You don’t know when the pandemic will end, but you can take control of your daily habits
  • “always have a little in reserve.”
  • Deplete your resources early and you’ll be in trouble. Focusing on day-to-day activities will pay off in the long run.
  • If you burn out all your mental energy in one day or week, you may find it more difficult to adapt when things don’t return to normal as quickly as you would hope.
  • Pace Yourself
  • “Don’t play all your cards at once and keep a little something in reserve.”
  • Create Mini-Goals
  • Sports psychologists frequently recommend creating mini milestones en route to a big goal. There are many steps on the path from base camp to a mountain’s summit. Likewise, there are smaller, more achievable milestones to reach and celebrate as you venture ahead into the unknown.
  • Focus on Something New
  • “I’m really good at breaking things down into small increments and setting micro-goals,” he said. How micro?
  • “I break things down to 10 seconds at a time,” Mr. Woltering continued. “You just have to be present in what you are doing and you have to know that it may not be the most fun — or super painful — now, but that could change in 10 seconds down the road.”
  • And it may not change quickly. Mr. Woltering said he has spent six-hour stretches counting to 10 over and over again. “You just keep moving and keep counting,” he said. “And you have to have faith that it will change at some point.”
  • Create Structure
  • “Part of expedition life is having a routine that you’re comfortable with. When I’m on expedition, I always start the day with a basin of warm water and soap. I wash my hands, face, neck and ears and get the sand out of my eyes,” he said. “It’s something that’s repeated that gets you a sense of comfort and normalcy.”
  • During the pandemic, he has found comfort and normalcy by getting outdoors, and climbing whenever possible to “run the engine.”
  • Dee Caffari, a British sailor and the first woman to sail solo, nonstop, around the world in both directions, said structure is imperative to fight back loneliness and monotony.
  • “In your day you need structure,” Ms. Caffari said. “You need to get up in the morning knowing you’re going to make something happen.”
  • “Setting goals that are controllable makes it easier to adapt,” Dr. Meijen said. “If you set goals that are controlled by other people, goals that aren’t realistic or are tough or boring, those are much harder to adapt to.”
  • When all else fails, look to something new: a new hobby, a new goal, a new experience
  • During a particularly hard patch of a competition, some athletes say they focus on a different sense, one that perhaps is not at the forefront of their mind when the pain sets in. A runner could note the smells around her and a climber could note the way his hair is blowing in the wind.
  • When athletes are injured, sports psychologists and coaches frequently encourage them to find a new activity to engage their mind and body. The key is to adapt, adapt and then adapt again.
  • “We all want mental toughness, it’s an important part of dealing with difficult things,”
  • “The current definition of mental toughness is the ability to pivot and to be nimble and flexible.”
  • “The next moment is always completely uncertain, and it’s always been that way,” Dr. Gervais said. But adapting, adjusting expectations and discovering new goals or hobbies can allow you to continue to build the muscle that is mental toughness.
  • Bottom line? “Optimism is an antidote to anxiety,”
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Who Is Weev, and Why Did He Derail a Journalist's Career? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...553295 journalism friendship Auernheimer
shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In the span of about six hours yesterday, The New York Times announced the hiring of Quinn Norton as a tech columnist and then apparently fired her. The Times claims that their decision to “go their separate ways” was guided by “new information,” revealed through a social-media maelstrom, about slurs Norton had used on Twitter and about her friendship with someone called weev. In October, Norton called weev “a terrible person, and an old friend of mine.” The rest of the world calls him a Nazi.
  • According to O’Brien, Auernheimer was an active user of a private chat server for Stormers, where, among other things, he forbade any members from talking to the police, coordinated a plan to send Nazis to Heather Heyer’s funeral, and wrote:
  • Auernheimer got involved with The Daily Stormer in 2014, after he was released from federal prison on identity-theft and hacking charges and living in Europe. Andrew Anglin, who was the focus of O’Brien’s story and who founded The Daily Stormer, said of Auernheimer in 2016, “I don’t know what I would be doing if it wasn’t for him ... He’s the one basically holding the whole thing together.”
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  • Norton has written for several other news organizations, including this magazine. Her October tweet explained, “Some of my friend (sic) are terrible people, and also my friends.
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What if You Knew Alzheimer's Was Coming for You? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eimers-Was-Coming-for-You.html alzheimers memory brain science
shared by knudsenlu on 02 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • When Ms. Gregory consulted with a neurologist about how to delay the onset of illness, he had four words for her: “Good luck with that.” After all, no drug had proven effective in reversing Alzheimer’s disease. And preventive measures like diet and exercise, the neurologist told her, would do no good.
  • So you may be faced with some difficult choices within the next decade: Do you want to receive potentially alarming news about your cognitive health, or would you rather not? If you learn that you have a high risk for Alzheimer’s, is that information you will want to keep private — from employers, clients, health insurers and others? Or will you want to openly embrace it as part of your identity and publicly advocate for a cure?
  • Jason Karlawish, a professor of medicine and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how people at high risk of Alzheimer’s disease cope with that knowledge. “We have to make it socially acceptable to talk about having risk of getting dementia,” he told me. “I think that is one of the ground zero struggles we are going to face in the coming decades.”
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  • In other words, welcome to the club: If you plan to live a long time, then you, too, belong to the high-risk group. Now what are you going to do about it?
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Imagining the Future Is Just Another Form of Memory - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...542832 memory future psychology brain science amnesia hippocampus evolutionary advantage bias
shared by knudsenlu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • humans predict what the future will be like by using their memories
  • “When somebody’s preparing for a date with someone they’ve never been on a date with before, or a job interview—these situations where we don’t have past experience, that’s where we think this ability to imagine the future really matters,” says Karl Szpunar, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. People “can take bits and pieces, like who’s going to be there, where it’s going to be, and try to put all that together into a novel simulation of events.”
  • The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well.
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  • Since then, functional MRI scans have allowed researchers to determine that many of the same brain structures are indeed involved in both remembering and forecasting
  • And just as memories are more detailed the more recent they are, imagined future scenes are more detailed the nearer in the future they are
  • It’s not hard to see how this ability to imagine the future gives humans an evolutionary advantage. If you can plan for the future, you’re more likely to survive it. But there’s are limitations as well. Your accumulated experiences—and your cultural life script—are the only building blocks you have to construct a vision of the future. This can make it hard to expect the unexpected, and it means people often expect the future to be more like the past, or the present, than it will be.
  • There’s also an “optimistic, extreme positivity bias toward the future,” Bohn says. To the point that people “always say future events are more important to their identity and life story than the past events.” Talk about being nostalgic for the future.
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In Some Countries, Facebook's Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...acebook-news-feed-changes.html
shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In Some Countries, Facebook’s Fiddling Has Magnified Fake News
  • SAN FRANCISCO — One morning in October, the editors of Página Siete, Bolivia’s third-largest news site, noticed that traffic to their outlet coming from Facebook was plummeting.The publication had recently been hit by cyberattacks, and editors feared it was being targeted by hackers loyal to the government of President Evo Morales.
  • But it wasn’t the government’s fault. It was Facebook’s. The Silicon Valley company was testing a new version of its hugely popular News Feed, peeling off professional news sites from what people normally see and relegating them to a new section of Facebook called Explore.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Facebook said these News Feed modifications were not identical to those introduced last fall in six countries through its Explore program, but both alterations favor posts from friends and family over professional news sites. And what happened in those countries illustrates the unintended consequences of such a change in an online service that now has a global reach of more than two billion people every month.
  • The fabricated story circulated so widely that the local police issued a statement saying it wasn’t true. But when the police went to issue the warning on Facebook, they found that the message — unlike the fake news story they meant to combat — could no longer appear on News Feed because it came from an official account.Facebook explained its goals for the Explore program in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Serbia in a blog post in October. “The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content,” wrote Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s News Feed. “There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries.”
  • The loss of visitors from Facebook was readily apparent in October, and Mr. Huallpa could communicate with Facebook only through a customer service form letter. He received an automatic reply in return.
  • ech giant may play in her country.“It’s a private company — they have the right to do as they please, of course,” she said. “But the first question we asked is ‘Why Bolivia?’ And we don’t even have the possibility of asking why. Why us?”
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Snapchat to stop promoting Trump after controversial posts - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html
shared by katherineharron on 03 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Snapchat (SNAP) will no longer promote President Donald Trump's account on its platform in the wake of his controversial comments on ongoing protests across the US, the company announced Wednesday.
  • "We are not currently promoting the President's content on Snapchat's Discover platform. We will not amplify voices who incite racial violence and injustice by giving them free promotion on Discover," Rachel Racusen, a spokesperson for Snap, Snapchat's parent company, said in a statement Wednesday.
  • "Racial violence and injustice have no place in our society and we stand together with all who seek peace, love, equality, and justice in America,"
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  • In a memo to Snap staff on Sunday, the company's CEO, Evan Spiegel, wrote, "we simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform. Our Discover content platform is a curated platform, where we decide what we promote. We have spoken time and again about working hard to make a positive impact, and we will walk the talk with the content we promote on Snapchat. We may continue to allow divisive people to maintain an account on Snapchat, as long as the content that is published on Snapchat is consistent with our community guidelines, but we will not promote that account or content in any way."
  • "There are plenty of debates to be had about the future of our country and the world. But there is simply no room for debate in our country about the value of human life and the importance of a constant struggle for freedom, equality, and justice. We are standing with all those who stand for peace, love, and justice and we will use our platform to promote good rather than evil."
  • Last week, Twitter for the first time affixed a fact-check label to multiple Trump tweets about mail-in ballots and days later put a warning label on a tweet from Trump about the protest, in which he warned: "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." Facebook chose not to act on identical posts that appeared on its platform.
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Huawei is growing faster than any other smartphone manufacturer − and Apple s... - 0 views

www.trustedreviews.com/...pple-should-be-alarmed-3953439
shared by tongoscar on 10 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Huawei’s market share is growing fast, thanks to its focus on the Chinese smartphone market.
  • One competitor who may be alarmed by these emerging figures is Apple. In the third quarter of 2018 the two companies had an almost identical share of the global smartphone market, Apple had 13.2% to Huawei’s 14.6%.
  • Huawei shipped higher volumes than expected as it shifted focus to its domestic market, particularly in lower-tier cities, and increased inventories given the unknown future with Google Mobile services.
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  • “While a sentiment of nationalism has helped to bolster Huawei in China, solid relationships with the local channel players has been key, offering favourable distributor terms and a well-rounded product portfolio. Nevertheless, there will be challenges ahead with 4G inventory to clear while consumers wait for affordable 5G products to hit the market.”
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Why Is Language Important to Culture? - 0 views

www.brighthubeducation.com/...nguage-is-important-to-culture Language Culture Importance
shared by marleen_ueberall on 15 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Why Is Language Important?
  • It is a uniquely human gift which lets us communicate and differentiates us from primates.
  • language is much more than just a means of communication. It is also an inseparable part of our culture.
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  • different cultures have a predominant fashion in which they use their language and they have differences which cannot be underestimated.
  • one of the most well known linguists in the world, argues that all languages are dialects of one language, which is the human language. He says that even though they appear very different, they are in fact very similar.
  • there is no doubt that language and culture are closely connected.
  • In Thai language there are twelve forms of the pronoun “you", which depend of factors such as status or level of intimacy.
  • We are encouraged to be direct and to speak our mind.
  • Asian cultures use an indirect style of communication. Words such as “perhaps" and “maybe" are used much more frequently than “yes", “no" or “for sure".
  • Personal and Contextual Styles
  • Two of the most frequently used words in our culture are “I" and “you".
  • American culture is not very formal, so it is appropriate to say “you" to your boss, to the President, to a stranger, to your spouse or to your child.
  • Direct and Indirect Styles
  • The style of language is focused on speaker and depends on someone’s status and identity.
  • Japanese pay a lot of attention to someone’s status and they use linguistic forms called honorifics, which are used according to the rank of the person who is speaking
  • Untranslatable Words
  • Many people don’t realize that there are plenty of words that cannot be translated from one language to another simply because they don’t exist in another language.
  • The word “shopping", which describes one of the most favorite activities of Americans, doesn’t exist in some other languages (such as for example in Russian) as a noun.
  • Another interesting example is the word “ilunga".
  • Republic of Congo and is considered to be the most untranslatable word in the world.
  • a person who is ready to forgive any transgression a first and a second time, but never for a third time.
  • Language Is Changing Along with the Culture
  • he and his were used generically in English language.
  • Since the United States and most of the English-speaking Western Europe are becoming less and less male-dominant cultures, the grammar rules have been changed and new gender agreement rules were created.
  • Fifty years ago nobody was suspecting that one day in the United States the words “mother" and “father" would become controversial and that some schools would agree to change them both to “parent".
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Why you may not be able to trust your own memories | The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...mory-remembering-a8687296.html memories
shared by marleen_ueberall on 04 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • Why you may not be able to trust your own memories | The Independent
  • Take storytelling for example. When we describe our memories to other people, we use artistic licence to tell the story differently depending on who’s listening.
  • we’re often guilty of changing the facts and adding false details to our memories without even realising.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • There are countless reasons why tiny mistakes or embellishments might happen each time we recall past events, ranging from what we believe is true or wish were true, to what someone else told us about the event, or what we want that person to think. And whenever these flaws happen, they can have long-term effects on how we’ll recall that memory in the future.
  • We rely on our memories not only for sharing stories with friends or learning from our past experiences, but also for crucial things like creating a sense of personal identity.
  • And we might change the story’s details depending on the listener’s attitudes or political leaning.
  • Research shows that when we describe our memories differently to different audiences it isn’t only the message that changes, but sometimes it’s also the memory itself. This is known as the “audience-tuning effect”.
  • memories can change spontaneously over time, as a product of how, when, and why we access them. In fact, sometimes simply the act of rehearsing a memory can be exactly what makes it susceptible to change. This is known as “retrieval-enhanced suggestibility”.
  • One theory is that rehearsing our memories of past events can temporarily make those memories malleable. In other words, retrieving a memory might be a bit like taking ice-cream out of the freezer and leaving it in direct sunlight for a while. By the time our memory goes back into the freezer, it might have naturally become a little misshapen, especially if someone has meddled with it in the meantime.
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